With a little help from [our] friends
Spotlighting the writing, research, and work of Connective Tissue subscribers and friends
One of the unexpected joys of writing this newsletter has been meeting and connecting with so many interesting people around the world. So, this week, we’re celebrating our subscribers and friends by exclusively sharing some of y’all’s work, including:
Our LinkedIn buddy, Seth Kaplan, in conversation with Gracy Olmsted on what it will take to repair our neighborhoods;
Our favorite philosopher, Ian Marcus Corbin, on rediscovering solidarity in America;
Our friend and GatherFor founder, Teju Ravilochan, with a request for support in imagining what community can do;
Our go to democracy experts, Hahrie Han and Dan Vallone, on establishing collective settings as “schools of democracy”; and
Our favorite community center wiz, Barrett Takesian, in conversation with Bill Burke on fostering cross-class connection through Portland Community Squash
We hope you enjoy reading about what your fellow subscribers are up to! And, of course, if you’ve published something recently that’s relevant to Connective Tissue, send it our way and we’ll try to highlight it in a future newsletter.
- Sam, David, + Eric
The Reads
Granola - “It’s Time to ‘Re-Villagize’ Your World” and “Redefining the American Dream” by Gracy Olmsted & Seth Kaplan
“If the social matters as much as, or even more than, the material, then our way forward must start with relationships—especially those that work sideways between neighbors locally and across neighborhoods nationally.”
In this two-part interview with
, Fragile Neighborhoods author (and our LinkedIn friend) Seth Kaplan explores the drivers of neighborhood decline and what it will take to repair our communities. Seth articulates how America has become a “fragile society,” where “less we are connected to one another—embedded in institutions that support us and those around us in our daily lives—the more destructive our social problems are likely to be.” He sees many American neighborhoods as experiencing a form of “social poverty,” defined by a lack of support from other people, weak local institutions, and a lack of robust social connections.Seth’s answer is part structural and part cultural. He believes transformational change can only occur when local people do the work to strengthen their communities—and connect and learn from one another horizontally, translocally across place. And he believes we need to reconnect, culturally, with the original understanding of the American Dream, which would “remind us to seek happiness and meaning in our relationships and social structures—and not in the freedom that comes from escaping those relationships and structures.”
→ Read Part I here and Part II here.
Notre Dame Magazine - “America Unraveled” by Ian Marcus Corbin
“A turn to a more solidaristic, less precarious way of life cannot simply be affected by technocrats. It requires Americans to rediscover what we love together, to locate anew our unity as a people.”
Our first newsletter highlighted our friend Ian Marcus Corbin's essay that challenged and complicated the concept of loneliness. In this more recent piece, he continues to untangle America’s hard to pin down, yet deeply interconnected series of crises that he believes is rooted in a “gut-level sense of precarity” — a precarity that has left many of us feeling alone and anxious in our ability to live economically secure lives. To address the underlying causes of this precarity, he advocates for a return to genuine societal cohesion and risk sharing, both nationally and within communities. This, in turn, could foster a sense of material solidarity and spiritual renewal, leading to concrete policies and practices that can make Americans feel less alone — economically and socially.
GatherFor - “Help us imagine what community can do” - by Teju Ravilochan
“The modern condition is mostly trying to do things on your own that people have historically achieved with a large support network and wondering why you’re tired all the time.”
Teju Ravilochan, the founder of GatherFor who we recently featured in Connective Tissue, is searching for examples of community-based approaches to address the needs of housing (e.g., intergenerational living), mental health (e.g., peer therapy circles), entrepreneurship (e.g., susus), and childcare (e.g., childcare co-ops). If you are practicing any of these models—or know of people who are—reach out to teju@gatherfor.org to share!
The Research
More in Common & SNF Agora Institute - “Searching for a New Paradigm: Collective Settings” by Dan Vallone, Hahrie Han, Emily Campbell, & Isak Tranvik
Collective settings—that is, “the sites or spaces from which any non-governmental public action emerges”—are the self-governing, Tocquevillian “schools of democracy” where neighbors come together across lines of difference to solve shared problems. The authors identify “four mutually reinforcing components” that “catalyze everyday democracy,” including their (1) design for directly participatory governance; (2) institutionalization of accountability; (3) embrace of difference; and (4) celebration of open-endedness and enabling of experimentation.
Writing for an audience concerned with revitalizing democracy, the authors argue that these collective settings have been underappreciated in recent decades in favor of institutional reform efforts (e.g., election reform) and individualized psycho-social interventions (e.g., anti-bias trainings). The result has been an undervaluing of these collective settings — from philanthropy’s underinvestment in the civic life of small towns and rural areas, to nonprofit groups’ shift away from the structures and practices that foster self-governance.
To the authors, a renewed emphasis on these collective settings will help “develop the muscles for democracy that people and communities will need” so that they can “seek, identify, and implement shared solutions that do not accept the world as it is but instead create the world they need.”
The Work
Portland Community Squash - Portland, ME
Our friend, Barrett Takesian, is the Founder and President of Portland Community Squash (PCS), a financially accessible community center that fosters cross-class social capital through the sport of squash. The key to PCS’s approach is intentionality: every facet of their model is designed to promote membership that reflects Portland’s demographics and programming that leads to community cohesion. PCS serves hundreds of Portland students each year through its programming and is beginning to realize its access and cohesion outcomes, which it publishes online through one of the most detailed theories of change we’ve ever seen.
Barrett recently sat down for an interview on the Blue Sky Podcast with our mutual friend, Bill Burke, to discuss his story and the PCS model (and he even gives a shout-out to Connective Tissue). You can listen to the full interview here.